Xenofeministisches Symposium

In the organizer's words:

++Please register by e-mail: info@assoziation-e.org++

++Full program at: https://www.assoziation-e.org/event-details/xenofeministisches-symposium++

Since 2020, the university group Desorientierungstage and the non-profit association Assoziation:E e.V. have been organizing seminars and colloquia at the TU Munich. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the feminist group "Laboria Cuboniks", whose theoretical approaches have provided important impulses not only for us, we are organizing a symposium in cooperation with the TUM Department of Science, Technology and Society at the end of this year. We cordially invite you to engage with the provocative perspectives of Laboria Cuboniks and to get involved with your own contributions.

Central to the work of Laboria Cuboniks is the concept of "xenofeminism", which relates feminist thinking to the (technical) sciences and puts forward a multi-layered concept of the foreign (Greek xénos) against naturalisms. The claim here is to combine (natural) scientific abstraction and epistemologies as well as technological imagination with a striving for social realities without domination-shaped gendering and without identity-political reification. The aim is no less than to overcome all discrimination based on alleged and real differences.

This focus goes back to "Nicolas Bourbaki", anagram of Laboria Cuboniks and pseudonym of a predominantly French collective of authors who worked in the mid-20th century on the axiomatic justification of mathematics according to criteria of abstraction, universality and formal rigor. Important points of reference for xenofeminism can be found in philosophy, design, architecture, mathematics, biology and engineering, meaning that the symposium is interdisciplinary from the outset.

Xenofeminism thus stands in a modern-utopian tradition: it refers to classically modern (and hitherto male-formed and dominated) forms of thought and does not call for their abolition, but rather their feminist appropriation. This is linked to a utopian reference to the potentials of rationality and technology that are inhibited by domination, which feminists should not reject but rather realize.